Ray Sokolov was recently appointed to the Gardiner Planning Board. Prior to that he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, and for many years he wrote a monthly column for Natural History magazine. For two years in the mid-1970s he was the restaurant critic for The New York Times, but most recently he has written a book titled Steal the Menu: A Memoir of 40 Years in Food, slated for release by Knopf this March. If the tales from the journalism trail that he tells with great humor and flourish at the kitchen table in his circa-1742 stone house in Gardiner are half as entertaining as those in his book, this could be a best-seller.